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Introduction

The lifelong process of acquiring skills, information, and knowledge is called learning. Many scientists now define learning as the organization of behavior based on experience. There are other definitions of learning because there are many theories about how humans and other animals learn. But all learning involves an interplay between an individual’s brain, the rest of the nervous system, and the environment—the surrounding world. (See alsobrain and spinal cord; nervous system.)

An 18th-century philosopher, David Hume, stated that all knowledge comes through observation and experience. Other thinkers disagree with him on this understanding of knowledge; but when his assertion is applied to learning, it certainly seems to be true. Observation and experience come to a person through perception—becoming aware of something by means of the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. Without these senses people would be like inanimate objects, unable to learn.

Functions and Forms of Learning

Learning affects an individual’s behavior in a number of ways. One of the most obvious ways is the acquiring of a skill. If a person learns to tie shoelaces, ride a bicycle, or swim, that skill will remain with him or her and will be improved by practice. Other skills—playing the violin or programming a computer—are more difficult to acquire and will be virtually lost if they are not practiced frequently. Skills like cooking or driving a car may be partially lost through disuse but may be regained fairly easily.

One form of learning is called conditioning. If a certain signal is linked with a condition, and is repeated a number of times, there will be an automatic learned response to the signal that is just the same as if the condition were present. For example, the sudden sound of a nearby car horn will make people automatically jump for safety without stopping to see if a car is actually present. Phobias are also examples of conditioning. A person may develop a fear of something quite harmless because it has become associated with a condition that is threatening. Conditioning is sometimes deliberately used in medical therapy as “behavior modification” to break harmful habits or form desirable new ones.

An important feature of learning is known as concept formation, the ability to form concepts, or ideas. An aspect of this type of learning is the ability to classify perceived objects by their similarities and differences. Consider, for instance, a boy walking down a street to the corner mailbox. He notices that the leaves on all the trees are virtually identical in shape. On his way back, he notices that the leaves on the other side of the street are all of a different shape. Based on these two sets of visual perceptions, he is able—even without knowing botany—to make a simple classification based on similarities and differences. Later he learns that all the trees on one side are oaks, while those on the other side are maples. He is thereby able to give a name to the classifications he has already made by himself.

This ability to conceptualize, to form ideas, is necessary for higher levels of learning. A girl who is studying geometry must learn to perceive the difference between a variety of shapes: circles, triangles, and squares and other rectangles, as well as the different shapes of the conic sections. The perceived differences will give her the idea, for instance, of a triangle. Triangles all share certain specific features that distinguish them from other shapes.

Ideas, as simple classifications and distinctions, are of limited value unless they are aided by training. An untrained ear may perceive three different pieces of dance music and only know that they are different. The trained musician will know that the first is a waltz, the second a samba, and the third a mazurka. It is by training and by naming that ideas get content whereby they can be shared. Animals other than human beings can perceive and remember differences in shapes, sounds, and smells. But they do not give names to the ideas they get; nor do they build upon their ideas over the passage of time. For humans, being able to name things and share ideas makes possible complex language and teaching systems.

Theories of Learning

For more than 2,500 years there have been theories about how people and other animals learn. No one theory has ever proved satisfactory to everyone for the simple reason that not enough is known about the brain and nervous system. Observations of animals in natural societies and in laboratories have contributed much to an understanding of the learning processes. With animals, experiments can be conducted under controlled conditions over a long period of time, and one or a few behaviors at a time can be studied. In these studies, learning is defined as a specific kind of relatively permanent change in the animal’s performance that accompanies experience and is not accounted for by other factors. Once learning is defined as a specific set of behaviors, these behaviors can be measured. New or improved performance can be assessed, and the experiments repeated, until a general consensus is reached that learning has or has not taken place.

Learning by association

One of the first modern theories of learning is learning by association. For example, a baby is uncomfortable and begins to cry. The mother picks the baby up to comfort it. The baby learns to associate crying with being picked up and will therefore cry whenever it wants to be picked up even if there is no discomfort. This is called learning by stimulus-response (S-R) association. The sight of the mother is called the stimulus, the crying is called the response, and the act of picking the child up is called the reward, or the reinforcement. It is the reward that makes the baby learn to use crying.

The phenomenon of conditioning is a form of learning by association. It was discovered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pávlov. He found that dogs formed saliva in their mouths in response to a bell that had previously been rung each time they got food. This is an example of S-R learning with positive reinforcement (the food). An example of negative reinforcement would be if a dog who is uncomfortably hot learned to press a button that could turn the heat off. In learning by punishment, the third type of S-R learning, the response decreases because it is followed by an unpleasant event. For example, if the mother got exasperated with the baby’s demands to be picked up and scolded her every time she cried, the crying (response) would decrease because it is followed by an unpleasant event.

Many psychologists have suggested that considerations other than association are more crucial to learning. For instance, psycholinguists (those who study the psychological aspects of language ability) argue that language involves too many words and combinations to be wholly explained by association theory. Instead, they argue that some basic organizing structure underlies language learning, perhaps an inherited native “grammar.”

Cognitive learning

Some theorists insist that learning takes place by organizing one’s perceptions in certain useful ways. In a famous demonstration of learning by insight, the German-American psychologist Wolfgang Kohler showed that chimpanzees fit several sticks together in a makeshift pole to obtain food that was otherwise out of reach. Their behavior suggested a sudden understanding of how to solve the problem rather than achieving their goal by trial and error. This is an example of the cognition theory of learning—that is, learning by perceiving and using insight or knowledge. (It is sometimes called the “a-ha” theory.)

Memory and Motivation

One learns that a burning candle is hot by feeling the heat. The ability of the brain to register the notion of heat, remember it, and later recall it means that a specific piece of information has been learned. Memory, therefore, is essential to learning.

Learning is a selective process. Far more is perceived than remembered; otherwise the mind would be a storehouse of miscellaneous, unassorted data.

There appear to be three levels of memory: immediate, short-term, and long-term. Immediate memory lasts no more than a couple of seconds, the time it takes for a sensory impression to register. Short-term memory is a matter of seconds or minutes: One looks up a phone number in the directory and makes a call; by the time the call is completed, the number has normally been forgotten. Long-term memory can last a lifetime, but some experts believe that information may be lost through disuse or may become flawed through reinterpretation.

Information often is transferred from short-term to long-term memory. One way this is done is by repetition and rehearsal, much the way an actor might memorize his or her lines from a script. Novel or vivid experiences seem to be more readily shifted to long-term memory. Other means of transfer are by the association of an unfamiliar name or fact with something that is already known, or grouping things together so that fewer facts at a time need to be absorbed. Many strategies are taught for improving memory.

The question just where memory takes place and how it is stored cannot yet be answered. Some studies of brain-damaged people are giving a few clues to brain physiologists, and sophisticated new tools are becoming available. Studies using positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans may illuminate the physiological basis of learning.

To what extent motives aid learning is undecided. Motives do contribute as incentives to performance of what has been learned. If an individual expects to be rewarded for doing well, performance (perhaps on a test) may improve. It also may worsen, if the fear and anxiety over not passing is great enough. Human motives in relation to learning are so varied and complex that controlled experiments to analyze them are virtually impossible.

Fay Webern

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